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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.2 (2002) 312-313



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Book Review

Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America


Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America. By Matthew G. Hannah (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000) 245 pp. $59.95 cloth $22.95 paper

Hannah's book applies Foucault's notion of "governmentality" to an analysis of American state development.1 As distinguished from approaches like Skowronek's that measure state "capacity," government- ality promises to provide a more subtle analytical tool by distinguishing between the capacity for regulation and decisions about "whether and how much to regulate" (37).2 Hannah develops his argument for the utility of governmentality through a discussion of the career of Francis Amasa Walker. Hannah is particularly effective in showing that Walker's work as director of the 1870 and 1880 U.S. censuses can be subjected to a Foucauldian analysis in such terms as "surfaces of emergence," "authorities of delimitation," and "grids of specification" (43).

As a historical geographer, Hannah is obviously concerned with space. The phrase from the book's title, "the mastery of territory," might suggest an interest in territorial control in the conventional sense, but Hannah focuses more on what he terms the "spatial politics of governmental knowledge" (113). Drawing on work that shows how colonial regimes use mapping to construct colonial knowledge, Hannah argues that Walker's exercises in mapping census data not only constructed social objects but helped to "encourage the assumption that the nation is a unified entity." Walker's maps also made a "visual argument that the most significant building blocks" for the nation "are the individual states," the consequence being that a city's significance was "absorbed in that of its state" (146-147).

Hannah extends his analysis by drawing on feminist scholarship to discuss the importance of gender for governmentality. Hannah situates Walker within the context of a "crisis of masculinity" in the late nineteenth century, arguing that Walker tried to regain control of society by promoting a militarized ideal of self-sufficiency for white men of the better social classes. Although Hannah's adoption of an "anxiety thesis" to explain the preoccupation of men like Walker with manhood is simplistic, he does demonstrate that Walker's ideas about masculinity were linked to his eventual advocacy of immigration restriction. For Walker, the "presence of foreigners was a threat to white American male potency" (185). The reason, Hannah explains, was that when white men saw how immigrants lived, they lost their desire for sexual intercourse. Walker's concern with immigration restriction, Hannah concludes, was "the culmination of his program of governmentality" (219). Hannah connects Walker's growing concerns with immigrants to his thought about several other matters, including the mobility and productivity of [End Page 312] labor, the place of "inferior races" in American society, and the role of education in creating a class of men suitable to govern.

Hannah effectively demonstrates that an approach informed by governmentality can shed light on certain features of American state activity during the late nineteenth century. The implications of this approach, however, are not entirely clear. Governmentality can help to show that censuses construct objects rather than simply reflecting them, but it does not explain the extent to which the categories that census makers use to construct objects are reflections of social categories that are constructed elsewhere in society. In other words, are censuses a primary or merely derivative site of social construction? Furthermore, despite Hannah's sometimes expansive claims for governmentality's utility, his observations about many aspects of Walker's project, such as immigration restriction, depend less on an analysis informed by government- ality than on a style of reading reminiscent of less theorized forms of intellectual and cultural analysis. By introducing scholars of state formation to governmentality, Hannah has provided an analytical tool that appears useful for certain tasks. The extent of its applicability, however, will depend on further studies and discussions.

 



Jeffrey Ostler
University of Oregon

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in Graham Burchell et al. (eds.), The...

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